LITTLE ROCK (AP) — A judge Wednesday sentenced a drug kingpin in eastern Arkansas to four decades in prison, delivering the first penalty in a widespread corruption and narcotics investigation that went public last fall.

Sedrick Trice didn’t say much as U.S. District Judge James M. Moody handed down his sentence — the first in the case dubbed Operation Delta Blues that culminated with dozens of arrests last year.

Prosecutors said Trice was one of two men who ran a drug-trafficking ring that pumped narcotics to towns in eastern Arkansas and neighboring Mississippi and Tennessee. He was accused of cooking cocaine into crack cocaine at least twice a week and sometimes twice a day.

He was also the first out of 71 people indicted in the case to plead guilty in December. A dozen others have since followed his lead, including four of the five law enforcement officers who were indicted in the case that focused on corruption and drug trafficking in the Mississippi Delta town of Helena-West Helena.

The same federal judge also sentenced one of Trice’s cohorts, Dempsey Word, to more than 16 years in prison on Wednesday. Word, 39, pleaded guilty to a drug-related charge earlier this year. Trice, 28, pleaded guilty to a drug-related charge and a firearms charge.

Word’s mother, Mary Wright, stood at the podium and pleaded with the judge to give her son the chance she said she never gave him.

“I blame myself for the trouble that my son is in,” Wright said. She wiped tears from her eyes as she returned to her seat.

Across the courtroom, Word rubbed his eyes too, before apologizing to the court and his family.

His attorney, Jason Files, asked the judge for leniency, but federal prosecutor Julie Peters said the court had been lenient with Word in the past to no avail. In the end, U.S. District Judge James Moody agreed with Peters.

“I do think this is a serious offense,” he said before delivering the sentence.

Trice’s sentencing hearing shortly before Word’s was far less dramatic, with Trice declining to talk on his behalf.

Instead, his attorney applauded him for taking responsibility of his actions, and Moody sentenced him to 40 years in prison — the proposed sentence outlined in his plea agreement.

“He has accepted responsibility, but it’s a very serious crime,” Peters said.

Prosecutors said Trice, who is also known as “Binky,” and a co-conspirator paid law enforcement officers to look the other way and tip them off when police planned action against one of them or their colleagues.

All the while, prosecutors said, they distributed large quantities of cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs to a number of customers and middlemen in the area and used code words to shroud their operations. A “nine-piece chicken dinner” meant 9 ounces of cocaine. “Football” stood for Xanax. “Popcorn” meant mid-grade marijuana, while “drizzle” meant hydroponic marijuana. A “Biggie Small CD” was 4.5 ounces of cocaine.